What I’m driving at is, if the loop really doesn’t terminate, it would still be safe to do that optimization because the incorrectly-optimized code would never

What I’m driving at is, if the loop really doesn’t terminate, it would still be safe to do that optimization because the incorrectly-optimized code would never be executed. I guess that doesn’t necessarily help in the “+=2” case, where you probably want the optimizer to do a “result += x/2”. In general, I’d greatly prefer to work with a compiler that detected the potential infinite loop and flagged it as an error.